Hunter's Moon

by Tess Grant

  Kitty half trotted to catch up. She could already tell she didn’t want to upset Ms. Norton. What had the librarian back in town called her? Intense? Formidable would have been the word Kitty chose.

  At least, I don’t need to make up a story with her.

  Ms. Norton pulled open an oak door at the rear of the room. On the other side, cement steps descended into the dark. Mr. Ponytail from Oakmont had gotten that detail right. Everything she wanted was down in the basement. The librarian flipped a switch on the sidewall and clumped down the steps. The air was colder as they descended but still dry and somehow dusty, as if filled with grit. It almost grated on Kitty’s skin, the way rough fingertips do on heavyweight paper. She knew she wouldn’t want to spend much time down here. It already made her skin crawl, and she hadn’t even gotten to the obituaries yet.

  Heavy wooden shelves ran the length of the room, which wasn’t a room exactly, but essentially the entire basement wide open and packed full. There were two doors set in against the wall. One had a unisex bathroom sign, the other was probably a cleaning closet, Kitty guessed. The shelves reached nearly to the ceiling, which was finished off. It wouldn’t do to have the pipes wide open and sweating over all these special collections.

  Ms. Norton spoke—or was it growled?—over her shoulder. “Only the obits? I pulled the books from ‘60 to ‘80, in case you had the year wrong.” She gave a half-shrug, then said, “Or wanted to look at any others.”

  Kitty paused. Had she told this woman she wanted to look at all the obits or just her great-grandmother’s? Ms. Norton paused in front of an old library carrel, salvaged when they built the new library. It was snugged into a corner, and an old book light was clipped to its back wall. Three-ring binders balanced precariously on a wooden cart with three shelves and a little plaque reading Books to be Shelved. Another salvage item, Kitty thought. New things down here might throw a wrench into Ms. Norton’s gears.

  “Here they are, marked by year on the spine. They’re just newspaper clippings in archive sleeves. If you find what you want, set it aside. I’ll handle the photocopying. As I explained on the phone, there will be a fifteen cent charge for any photocopies.” She turned aside and motioned along the north wall. “There is a microfiche reader there. I put the films from Oakmont in cases to better store them.” At that, there was a smile, a tight little ‘See how dedicated I am?’ type of smile.

  Kitty went over to the chest-high wooden cases. She pulled out the top drawer of one and lined up inside were small reels with something like negatives spooled on them.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s all the back issues of The Observer, that little paper that gets published up there. That’s everything since it started publishing in 1952 through 2002. It started archiving on the ‘net then. If you want to look up any of the newspaper articles from back then, you find the year you want and scroll through on the reader ‘til you find it. Loading instructions are on the reader itself.”

  “Okay.” Kitty felt a little daunted. I guess if Phinney can do it, I can too.

  “Call me if you need help. I’ll be upstairs.” Ms. Norton walked away. Her foam-soled shoes made no noise on the industrial strength linoleum.

  Kitty turned to the carrel. Back to the door, that’s great, she thought, and then reassured herself. Come on, it’s not as if I’m a gunslinger.

  Not yet anyway, her mind replied.

  The obits were super easy, just like the reference guy had said. Pick a binder and start leafing through. The binders for the early ‘60s were four or five inches thick, and there were even multiple volumes for some years. They started tapering down to a respectable two inches or so by the early ‘70s and were consistently smaller by ‘75. Thompson had been well established by ‘75, probably already plotting on when he could retire and how to get Phinney to take his place.

  She grabbed a couple at random and started leafing through. The obituaries at that time were more like news articles, which made sense since deaths and births were probably the biggest news in Oakmont other than farm market prices and the escalating war. She started with 1967.

  “Boy’s Body Found After Three-Day Search,” the headline trumpeted on the first obituary she flipped to. “The body of James Stilwell, 12, was found this morning after a three-day search. The boy, known to friends and family as Jimbo, was on a camping trip in the national forest near Oakmont with his cousin Jesse.” The article had a folksy voice, rambling on about the search and adding in comments from grieving family. Kitty finally found two sentences that chilled her more than the basement air. One was before the listing of the visitations, funeral and names of the surviving kin. “Search continues for Jesse Stilwell, still missing.” The other was the last line. “Closed casket service.” Kitty thought of the gashes ripping through the deer. Of course it was.

  “Tommy Baker Dies In Freak Accident,” screamed the next headline. Farmer Tommy had been having some problems with coyotes killing his cows. He had decided to wait the night through in the pasture. The article prattled on about how it was commonly believed he had been trampled by the cows when they stampeded at the sight of the coyotes. Or some other large carnivore, Kitty thought grimly. Another closed casket service.

  It continued on in the same vein: Death after death, all out in the boondocks, all closed caskets. Some obituaries hinted darkly at animal activity at the site; others, especially those involving children, women or elderly, were conspicuously silent other than the telltale sentence, “Closed casket service.”

  Kitty felt grimy after wading through ten years picked at random. She didn’t need to pick another ten years to see how bad it was. What she did need was a shower to wash it all away. She checked her watch. An hour and twenty minutes. That was about seventy minutes too long. She flipped the binder shut and its heavy pages slumped closed, the noise rattling around the basement shelves.

  She looked at the microfiche reader and sighed. One issue of The Observer. She didn’t think she could stand to look at any more than that. She didn’t need the articles on town violence; the obituaries had convinced her already. She opened a drawer at random and pulled out a reel. When she finally figured out how to load it, she began spooling quickly through tiny images of newsprint. Occasionally, she blew up the image size on a page. On the front page of the last issue of that reel, she found a headline that pulled her in. “Zubowicz Dies in Forestry Accident.”

  Zubowicz? That was Joe’s last name.

  “Joseph Zubowicz, 25, of Oakmont was killed in a freak accident last night.”

  There was that word freak again. Couldn’t they come up with anything better? They were wordsmiths, weren’t they?

  Joe Zubowicz—although who this Joe Zubowicz was she didn’t know—had been a United States forest ranger. He had been supervising some forestry work being done in the Manistee National Forest. One night, one of the lumberjacks didn’t come back in with the rest of the crew. That made Zubowicz uneasy; “spooked” was the word one of the crew was quoted using. He headed out into the woods as night was falling but took his sidearm along. He hadn’t allowed anyone to accompany him, including his partner Kevin Irish.

  Kitty read the name twice. Her dad was the last of the Irish clan in this area—well, technically Sam was. Probably some shirttail relative who had since moved on. She shrugged and scanned through the rest of the article. All she wanted right now was for this particular fact-finding mission to be over.

  “One missing is enough,” Zubowicz had supposedly said. The lost forester was found at the local bar later that night, crying into his beer over a split with his girlfriend. Zubowicz’s body was found the next day near the forestry equipment. There was some evidence of trauma—by this time they had started using that word in the paper—believed to be from the forestry equipment itself, although animal activity could not be ruled out.

  She hit the print button and heard the printer across the room whir into life.

  She spooled to the obits. In these later y
ears, they were on a separate page in The Observer. As long as she was right here, it didn’t make any sense checking the binder on the carrel desk. It was easy to find, last one on the alphabetically ordered page. She hit print as soon as she found it. Closed casket. Yes, she had known that was coming. But who was he? The whole room narrowed down to those few lines of fuzzy type. In the survivors, she found the name she was looking for. Stan Zubowicz of Oakmont. Joe’s father.

  The heroic ranger had been Joe’s uncle.

  Joe had said he had been named after an uncle; an adored big brother who died before his time. Kitty knew what had killed him, and it hadn’t been a chipper-shredder or an errant chainsaw or a skidder that had rolled over him.

  It had been a werewolf. She wondered if Joe knew.

  Chapter Eleven

  Phinney held the dark stained gun out to her. They stood below the cabin in the meadow. Wildflowers swayed in the soft yellow heat, and she was three days and two nightmares away from the special collections building.

  The nightmares had been the same both nights—climbing out of the basement, the ancient powdery air clinging to her and binders of obituaries filling the shelves at her back. She had pushed through the heavy glass door of the college building and come out in her own backyard in Oakmont, into the rolling field that swept up to the hardwoods of the Manistee National Forest. Covering it all were rows upon rows of caskets, sealed tight from viewing by mourners because what lay inside them was unrecognizable anyway—unrecognizable and horrifying. The sweet peas that normally covered the field were ground down into the trampled grass, little spots of purple-pink against swirls of mud. The field was bigger than it had ever been in life but somehow smaller too, in that weird landscape dreams inhabit. Bigger because it could accommodate so many caskets, smaller because she could see clearly all the way to the trees. Under them, a shadow moved, darker than any other shadow out there. It paced, waiting. For her. She had woken shaken and sweating at the same instant its screaming howl rang out. Somehow, she had managed not to scream too. She was lucky the coffins stayed closed through the whole dream. There would have been some screaming if they hadn’t.

  She had ridden home with Joe from the university in near silence. Taken with the campus and, of course, the college girls, he had been chatty enough to fill the spaces she’d left empty. He had loaded her up with pamphlets and details about the campus, and when her mom asked her about it that night at dinner, she had remembered none of it.

  What had people been thinking? All those deaths. All those missing people. Kitty thought of her mother’s warnings about the forest at full moons, of Jenna’s grandmother’s nerves that fluctuated with its rising every month. Oakmont knew there was something wrong. They just didn’t know it well enough to give it a name.

  Phinney cleared his throat and Kitty snapped back to the present. He had pulled the gun back to cradle against his chest, but when he saw he had her attention again, he held it out. “With me?” he asked.

  She nodded, running an eye over the wood. The stain looked uniform enough to be caused by age and not blood splatter. She took the gun gingerly, one hand on the stock, one on the forearm near the barrel.

  “For a girl whose daddy taught her how to shoot, you act a little gun shy.”

  “It’s been a long time,” she said defensively.

  “I can see that. We’re going to start with this one. We’ll move on to the .45 later.” He rapped on the stock of the gun with a knuckle. “M1 carbine. Issued to paratroopers like Thompson in the war. Us grunts carried Garands—big heavy things. It would be great for the work we’re doing, but too heavy for me these days. These old bones won’t hack it.”

  Kitty wasn’t sure she was following all this history but knew she had better concentrate anyway. She rolled the gun over in her hands. “So this thing is as old as you are.” She clamped her lips shut as soon as the words were out, but Phinney smiled.

  “I prefer to think of it as antique.” Phinney patted the dark stock with a strange sort of tenderness. “And no, it’s not as old as I am. It’s a good twenty years younger.”

  That seemed to be splitting hairs. Both Phinney and the gun were World War II veterans. Her history teacher would call that the same era.

  Phinney pulled his hand back. “This one kind of came with the territory, since it was Thompson’s. It used to have a paratrooper stock—a little folding metal thing, but I can’t stand those. Swapped it out to wood. So let’s get started.”

  “Hold on.” Kitty looked down at the weathered gun in her hands, then at the equally-weathered man opposite. “You’re going to hand me an antique gun and say let’s go? When do you hand out the extrasensory powers? How about the martial arts?”

  Phinney laughed. “Wait until you’re in your eighties and try doing martial arts. Besides, stick your foot in a werewolf’s face and you’ll end up with no foot.”

  “I thought werewolf hunters were at least endowed with …with something.”

  He snorted. “Bad judgment maybe, for getting involved in the business in the first place. Unfortunately, kid, I’m just an old man with an old gun. I’ve got nothing special. So don’t feel like you’re coming to the party without your party dress.”

  Kitty rolled her eyes. As if I own a party dress.

  Phinney started reciting the safety rules: Assume it was always loaded, know the target and beyond, never point it at anyone, keep the safety on. Kitty repeated them back until Phinney was satisfied she had them. He reached into a cargo pocket on the side of his pants and pulled out a box. “Hold out your hand, kid.” She held out her palm and Phinney rolled some bullets into it. “Next lesson. Loading the magazine.”

  “Hey,” she said, feeling the bullets roll and collide between her fingers. “I just thought of something. If Thompson couldn’t kill the wolf with the .45 in the first place, why are you going to teach me how to use it? Why did he let you take it the night you were out in the woods?”

  Phinney’s eyebrows quirked upward. “Ahh. Good thinking. Guess I left that part out. The difference isn’t in the gun. The difference is in the bullets.” Phinney rooted in his other cargo pocket, scratching around in the corners. He pulled out a single bullet with a flourish and held it out to Kitty.

  The thing sparkled in the light, burnished to a shine from rolling around in the old man’s Dickies. Kitty slid the ammunition in her hand into the pocket of her shorts and tucked the carbine into the crook of her arm. She held out her empty hand and Phinney placed the bullet on it.

  “That is as close to a bad TV movie as we’re going to get,” he said.

  She lifted it up close to her face. The bullet was a heavy weight in her palm, solid and dense, and it shone. If it weren’t shaped like a bullet, she’d hang it on a chain and wear it. Wrinkling up her forehead, she raised her eyes from it. “Silver?”

  “Bingo.” He shot an index finger at her.

  For a minute, she thought he might cackle with glee. Nobody must have answered these questions right before.

  “I know it sounds crazy,” he continued, “but they work. Most of the folklore cures Thompson found weren’t a good bet.” Phinney ticked them off on his fingers. “Making a werewolf kneel in the same spot for one hundred years. Spilling three drops of its blood. Hah. Try that when it’s trying to chew your arm off. Beating it on the forehead with a knife three times. Thompson figured he might as well try silver bullets.”

  “Where do we get these?” Kitty handed the ammunition back. “Off the Web?”

  “We make ‘em.”

  Kitty’s eyes widened in sudden comprehension. “The antique lady. She kicked you out when you were trying to buy spoons.”

  Phinney wiped at his face with a faded red paisley bandana. “I scour that shop for silver every few months. Her prices are out of this world though.”

  The old man looked wiped out. Kitty had a quick flash of him keeling over dead before he had a chance to show her what to do. Holding out the M1 to him, she said, “Hold on
a minute. I’m going to pull one of your chairs off the porch. I’m getting tired already.” It was a thin lie, but Phinney only nodded gratefully.

  From his seat in the shade, he showed her how to load the magazine, then how to put the magazine in the gun. He showed her the correct stance and how to aim. The gun was small and light. The dark-oiled mechanism still worked like it was two or three years old, not sixty-five. The heavy thunk of the bolt was as metallic and solid as an old car door. Kitty found it oddly satisfying.

  Two sheets of plywood bolted together were fastened to a four-by-four on the west side of the meadow. Logs were placed tight up behind, spaced twelve inches apart or so. A number of targets hung on the plywood, all tacked up right in front of a log. If she hit the targets, she would be going through an inch and a half of plywood before the bullet buried itself into a six-inch log.

  Phinney saw her looking at it. “We’re shooting west. No houses that way and the ground slopes up. South, things head mostly downhill. Your place is east, and north…,” he nodded his head toward his cabin. “Ready to try a few? We’re about twenty-five yards away. We’ll be working at close range in the field, so we’ll practice fairly close too. Let’s try standing first.” He handed her some earmuffs.

  Kitty squared off her feet and settled the butt tight against her shoulder. She remembered shooting with her dad and the sore shoulder she always got after a few shots. She didn’t know what she had been thinking when she chose to wear a tank top today, but it hadn’t been shooting, that was for sure. She looked down the barrel, and pulled the bead down into the sights. Beyond it hovered the target, floating up and down with her breathing.